Robopocalypse: DinoBots
Remember dinosaurs? No? Let me refresh your memory.
They were giant monsters. See those big teeth and those sharp claws? They were meant for one thing: murder. Dinosaurs were far more deadly than any fictional monsters we’ve come up with. Dracula? Please. What’s he going to do? Suck all of the blood out of T-Rex? Maybe if Joey Chesnut became a vampire he’d have a chance, but otherwise the dinosaur wins. Same thing goes for Wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster, Freddie, Jason, the girl from the Ring, and on and on.
And I, for one, am glad that the dinosaurs are no longer with us. Call me crazy, but I like being able to go for a hike in the woods and not having to worry about a pack of Velociraptors trying to eat me.
And yes, I realize that Jesus didn’t have any problems getting along with the dinosaurs. But I’m no Jesus.
I thought that everyone would agree with this. That while dinosaurs are really cool and interesting, it’s probably for the best that they’re all dead now.
I was wrong.
Apparently toy makers are all for bringing dinosaurs back into our lives. And not just any dinosaurs. Robot dinosaurs.
For the past few years toy makers have been developing robot dinosaurs that are getting more and more realistic. This trend started with Ugobe’s Pleo, the baby robot Camarasaurus.
I realize that this thing is incredibly cute and probably wouldn’t hurt a fly. However, he does have binaural hearing and infrared sensors for detecting external objects. So theoretically he could hunt us down, even in the dark. But the problem really isn’t with Pleo. It’s with where this dinobot trend is going. Just look at what Mattel came up with as their response to Pleo.
D-Rex: the robot Tyrannosaurus Rex who will attack on command.
D-Rex’s creators describe him as “A ferocious yet loyal dinosaur with an independent personality.” Translation: he will kill someone for you. They also say that from time to time D-Rex will “demand food.” Which means that they programmed him to get hungry. So now not only do we have to worry about robots enslaving us one day, we also have to worry about them eating us to quell their hunger. Great.
Plus, loyal to who? Whoever owns him, that’s who. So what are we going to do if another robot manages to scrounge up the $145 it costs for a D-Rex?
Beware the robot piggy bank. He’s raising money to buy a D-Rex.
And I can’t forget Kota, the $300 robot Triceratops who will let your child bounce around on its back.
For now, anyway. How long is it going to take for Kota to get sick of our chubby little kids bouncing on his back before he bucks one off and starts gnawing on his neck?
So now even toy makers are contributing to the impending Robopocalypse. It wasn’t like this when I was kid. Back then they gave us toys that we were in total control of. You never had to worry about a Manglor turning on you. Those things were our bitches.
We could stretch them out, slap them against the wall (or our little brother’s face if he got out of line), rip their arms off, rip their legs off…who the hell cares if it was impossible to put them back together again as promised! So what if I ruined every single Manglor I ever got by ripping its head off the second I got it out of the package!
At least they weren’t deceptively cute robot dinosaurs who would one day contribute to the enslaving of the human race.
